Methods that are available to measure crop yield include: direct determination, and instantaneous measurements of volume or mass flow. A common practice is to use scales to directly measure the weight of bins containing small sections of a harvested crop. These bins are usually containers mounted on wagons, trailers or harvesters. However, due to the characteristics of this method, yield information is obtained for entire fields or strips of a field. The yield of a large area is indirectly integrated by averaging the data and, consequently, a coarse-ground resolution is obtained for this type of monitoring system.
Instantaneous flow type monitors are commercially available with either volumetric or mass flow-type sensors. Volumetric type yield monitors have typically been developed for cotton harvesters. A mass type yield monitor is present in grain crop production (typically uses impact plates), as well as in the production of potatoes, tomatoes (uses a type of load cell sensor) and other crops. Yield monitoring systems depend heavily on ground resolution. In either type of monitor, however, the fine ground-resolution obtained from instantaneous monitoring systems is degraded due to transport lag of crops inside the harvesters. Consequently, yield maps suffer some sort of integration during the process of their creation.
It is desirable to monitor the yield of crops. For example, vegetable crop specialists, farm advisors, and extension specialists rely on accurate measurement of tomato yield to test the performance of new tomato varieties and other agronomic procedures. These studies are usually conducted in controlled plots. For example, weigh wagons are usually used to obtain tomato yield data. Although accurate, weigh wagons are expensive, require an additional tractor and operator, slow down harvesting, cause considerable damage to tomatoes and are not easy to transport from one field to another.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems.